Popular web sites now enable customers to create and order a variety of personalized print products, including inter alia calendars, greetings cards, notepads, and photo books. Customers insert their own text and photos within templates provided on the web sites and in retail stores, and fulfillers print the resulting photo products. Such web sites include www.snapfish.com operated by Hewlett-Packard Company of Palo Alto, Calif., www.shutterfly.com operated by Shutterfly, Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. and www.blurb.com operated by Blurb, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif. Such retailers include Walmart and Walgreens.
Orders for personalized print products typically involve low quantities. Often customers order only a single copy of a book or calendar. As such, a fulfiller must be able to print and manage a very large number of very small jobs. Moreover, the jobs themselves often include a variety of component parts. For example, a book generally includes a dust cover, a spine and the pages themselves.
Managing and monitoring orders for large numbers of personalized print products as they proceed through a print workflow moving from prepress to press to postpress is very complex. Such complexity stems from many factors, including job ingest, job scheduling, coordination of physical component print parts on the shop floor, product dispatch, inventory control, machine maintenance, failover protection, product defects, customer returns, irregular seasonal volume, and much more.
Conventional short run printing systems enable printing of small quantities of a document. Conventional variable data printing systems enable changes in text on a per document basis. For example, multiple copies of a letter can be printed, and a name can be changed for each copy.
However, conventional printing systems are not optimized for the complexity of the massive volume and diversity of small individual print jobs characterized by online printing systems that cater to consumers and small businesses. There is thus a need for a method and system to efficiently manage and monitor the fulfillment printing workflow, in order to guarantee that an order consisting of a plurality of print products is printed, bound and shipped within a prescribed deadline.
It has been found advantageous to synchronize the rate of output, or cadence, of certain steps of the printing workflow with subsequent workflow steps that utilize the output. For example, it is often advantageous to synchronize the rate of print jobs that are provided to a printing press with the rate at which a finishing system can perform finishing processes such as binding, and packaging. Such synchronization aims to avoid having print jobs mount up on the shop floor. While lean manufacturing processes that manage an output rate have been used in industrial manufacturing they have not been applied in modern digital printing systems.